“Copyright law is designed to balance the interests of creators with the interests of the public.”

Being a starting point (a purpose), this statement, often repeated, must be analized.

It is like saying that criminal law is designed to balance the interets of criminal with the interests of the public. No one would beleieve that. Criminal laws are designed to prevent crime. That is the starting point.

It is like saying that labor laws are designed to balance the interest of employers with the interests of the workers. No one would beleieve that. Labor laws are designed to give rights to the workers. That is the starting point.

It is like saying that banking laws are designed to balance the interest of depositors with the interests of bankers. No one would beleieve that. Banking laws are designed to prevent fraud by banks.

Sure, we know that politicians have a habit of forgetting the starting points (purpose) of the laws they are designing. They start in one direction and get lost in the way. Most laws I have seen and I have seen many have this problem. They say the purpose is to get to the north, and wind up in the south.

Then what is copyright law designed to do?
Up to now it is designed to make a few industry barons wealthy and many artists, songwrters, scientists, poets very poor. The law has been designed by the industry barons. Sure, some artists, songwriters (poets, others, enginner, scientists, never) have voiced their opinion, after having been brainwashed by their publishers and record companies that its all about the money they will (frequently never will) receive.

That should change. The new design should be to maximize the production and availability of quality intellectual works at the least cost to the people. In order to do that yo need to know what it costs to produce intellectual works. A photograph may cost $0 and be worthless to the public and a movie may cost $100 million and bring great joy to the public, while a book by a scientist may be somewhere in the middle, with value, perhaps, to other scientists and worthless to the general public. Surely it is senseless to think that one copyright law will do the complicated trick of maximizing the production of quality intellectual works at the least costs.

Let’s take photographs. Copyright law has done little to promote the production of quality photographs and their enjoyment by the public, certainly not a fraction of what the invention of digital cameras and the Internet have done. The point: Copyrights do little for photographs. Technology has done a great deal.

Let’s take movies. Certainly no movie producer will invest $ millions, if the movie producers did not own copyrights and the movie can be copied freely upon release or after too short a period of the owner’s copyright. We must agree then that copyrights for the proper, calculated (on a movie by movie basis?), pediod are required for movie production if the production is not financed with public money (which is another possibility).

Let’s take music creation, publishing and recording. These fall in the middle. Too, no one will spend $ thousands to make a symphonic work recording if there were no copyright for the producers, and that would be bad for the public. At the other extreme, a singer will record, if need be, for nothing even if there is no copyright for him/her (as is frequently the case, as copyrights wind up in the hands of the barons).

Based on the above, I propose that all talk about copyright law should have the starting points that are clear:

- The purpose is to promote the creation and availability of intellectual works at the least cost to the people.

- Different laws are needed for different types of intellectual works. Each law has different copyright duration formulas (method calculating copyright duration) based on scientific methods (Operations Research optimization methods) and not as requested by special inteets grops.

- Copyrights are lost when sales stop. A movie that is not available for the public to see in a theater and is no longer sold for home viweing, should not have any copyright, regardless of original copyright’s duration. This is because avalability is extremely important to the people. Perhaps it is everything.

- Claiming copyright on public domain works should be a crime. It should also be prohibited the locking of the works so it cannot be copied. Any lock should automatically become inactive as soon as a work enters public domain. Is this is technically unworkable and means the end of DRM, then let it be. Again, availability is supreme.

Sure, it’s complicated and simple minded legislators may not be fit for the task. Judges too may not be fit to judge the laws. That is precisely why we have a huge legal mess that makes no sense to the people and industries (at least the musicians) going down the drain.

Then, lets change them.

The length of time to open an article tends to favor timeouts more than success at seeing the article. Good thing you are off and surfing because the articles would be off the page and new ones up without ever seeing what they were. Hope this gets straightened out sometime soon because under the present conditions it’s not worth the wait for a “maybe” it will open to see an article.

but they should add a segment to abolish the CRIA since they no longer are needed, the artists can pretty much promote them selves on the internet.